Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Welcome to the Hopeless Zone! Pay for your dreams at the coat check, they'll be neatly shredded.

Once I drunkenly took a dare and made a promise to start a publishing company with zero capital.

I always keep even my drunkenest promises, so long as they don't involve my orifices and a jackfruit, so here it is.

All books are available as ebooks on Amazon (see how that no money thing works now? And see how this venture is only going to last till I get sued?) and will, as soon as I can figure out the tricky pricing business, be available on paper as Amazon PODs,* which to my mind are another type of ebook.

Because many people just need something to sniff, and to hold.

I understand; although I was jazzed to learn BASIC in the 1980s I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with the device age. Although if your caveat is "I don't have a Kindle," please note: Kindle books can be read on any computer.

(And are smartphones really my problem, or is it really that we're all drowning in a sea of seven billion meaningless meaning-seeking souls? Or maybe it's this vaunted democratization of publishing. Shudder. Such an ego-avalanche is as sure to kill the next Confederacy of Dunces sequel as the plutocratic publishing industry of old. Thus my business model: I'm not staking money, I'm staking my reputation as a judge of texts. I have always dreamed of a meritocracy, and this is as close to such a little kingdom as I can probably get.)

I have to warn you though, Amazon charges an arm and a goddamn leg per treepage.

AAAAAANYWAY. I had to write the first two books myself. But within days you will be treated to the opportunity to purchase...

BEYOND THE BUSH!

... a unique slab of dystopian satire that represents the fruit of Juvenal-only-knows how many hours of labor and winnowing over the past decade or so on the part of one Robert Ignatius Dillon.

I was wondering all along whether Dillon's BUSH would turn out to be an incoherent waste of the poor creature's time, but it didn't. It definitely did not. There was a method behind his madness after all, or at least it appears in the end that there was, and that's what matters.

But more on that later.

For now, here are the attractive cover shots of and handy links to the currently available Hopeless cyberproducts:

Anyway, here's the cover, very nicely designed by Mike Browarski (WHOM I PAID for his work, you cheap baboons):

It's roughly a year in the life of John Jaggo, an unusually angry but meek victim of the recent turn of the wheel of economic history. Having nothing better to do, he decides to laminate his diary in hopes that future archaeologists will be amused by it. Then he gets blacked-out pissed on Halloween and wakes up to discover he's drunk-dialed a murderous demon. The future archaeologists are more shocked than amused, since Jaggo's reports of his existence are so different from the many copies of popular movies that they've dug up; but arguing with each other over the manuscript certainly keeps them busy.

Finally, Hopeless Books invites you to e-read my first novel,GIRL DETECTIVES, a comic mystery of misplaced revenge. It also unintentionally served as a chronicle (albeit caricatured) of the last golden days of the newspaper industry in Chicago.

GIRL DETECTIVES is already available on paper; in fact its original incarnation was as a POD, before the e-reader thing happened; I gave up on shopping it around back in the days when publishers didn't accept electronic submissions quite yet, and I was a "nontraditional student," and didn't have the money to shit my pants, much less mail bricks of paper to dozens of disgruntled slush-pile minions.

Anyway, the paper POD is currently overpriced and I need to reformat it, but the Kindle version is cheap.

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HOME OF SATIRE

If you have to live in the 21st century, then you might as well examine that disgusted feeling deep in your gut, because we're all going to die and that's the only fact. (Time and matter actually might be illusions, smartass.) All Ebooks and POD paperbacks, because I don't have any money. And look, you don't need to buy a special Kindle device. You can read ebooks on any computer. So if you can read this, you can read that. AND WE NOW HAVE PAPERBACKS. Have fun, worm food!

Submissions

So you wrote a book, huh? And you can't get it published, eh? If you're nonetheless certain that it's brilliantly written (THOSE BASTARDS!) and you're willing to settle for the companionship of a wacky, rag-tag, suicidally reckless crew that can't even afford goddamned paper, you may well find a home for it here. (asterzingerzATgmail)

Hopeless Books is mainly interested in publishing fiction (by which I DO NOT mean your thinly veiled trust-fund baby autobiography where there's a funeral and some schoolboyish attempts to show how good you are at describing things, you fucks), but if you've written something nonfictional that's well-written AND hilarious, interesting, or controversial, please send it my way.

Genre fiction is welcome, including (I sup-pose) litfic. Who knows, someone might eventually write a good litfic novel. Monkeys, in a room, typewriters, etc.

WHY OUR BUSINESS MODEL IS FUCKING GENIUS

The owner and executive executioner of this publishing company takes no financial risks; the risks are only to my reputation as a reader, writer, editor, and selector of texts. This allows this imprint to publish only great shit, artistically speaking, marketability be damned, and if you philistines don't buy it the joke's on you, because we ain't out of pocket. Ha ha!

The only bit of sand in the petroleum jelly here is the publishing platform's cut. They should get something, after all, for providing the platform, but I find their cut to be a bit unreasonable considering the relatively small space text files take up. Oh well, we'll just board and loot them eventually.